U. alumnus brings back muckraking

James O'Keefe is an American patriot and a hero. He is a
muckraker of the highest regard, and he is a Rutgers grad. For
those of you who have never heard of O'Keefe, he is the founder of
The Centurion and one of the leading pioneers of the conservative
movement at Rutgers. He has since graduated, entered law school and
worked as a conservative journalist, frequently using hidden
cameras to expose hypocrisy, silliness and more recently, a
deeply-rooted perversion in a community organizing group called the
Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

O'Keefe has many YouTube gems, like the time he convinced the
Brower Commons staff that Lucky Charms cereal discriminates against
Irish-Americans. He also has exposed a Planned Parenthood
operation, which was willing to accept money specifically earmarked
for aborting black fetuses. He has made other videos, all of them
worthy of praise — and perhaps some derision — but it is his latest
videos that have made him a celebrity and a hero for conservatives
everywhere.

O'Keefe, along with his 20-year-old friend Hannah Giles, has
taken down the most powerful and influential community organizing
group in the country. All it took was $1300, a hidden camera and a
little creativity. ACORN describes itself as "the nation's largest
grassroots community organization of low-and moderate-income
people." It also has get-out-the-vote drives. This has
conservatives crying foul over the possible voter fraud
implications. No legal investigation ever taken place, because
ACORN has powerful friends, including President Barack Obama
himself. Since ACORN is closely allied with Democrats, everyone
knew that it would take something drastic to shift the political
winds.

O'Keefe did something drastic. He and Giles dressed up as a pimp
and prostitute, and they traveled to ACORN headquarters all across
the country, filming his attempts to obtain advice on setting up a
house in which teenage girls from El Salvador would work as sex
slaves. This is not a joke. He actually told countless ACORN
employees that he planned on laundering the money his prostitutes
earned to pay for a political campaign. One San Diego-based ACORN
lawyer even made sexual advances toward Giles. Of course, such
practices are illegal — let alone immoral — and as a firm that
received billions of dollars from the federal government, ACORN
should have immediately kicked the two pranksters out of their
offices. But they did not. Comedian Jon Stewart even joked that
such practices were probably so commonplace for ACORN that the
group has special forms for aspiring prostitutes/money-launderers
to fill out. It is funny to joke about, but it is scary that such a
perverse organization carries (or at least carried) such political
clout in America. It is also sad that a firm established to help
lower-income people is so incompetent.

It is easy to dismiss these illegal activities as the result of
a few bad apples — or bad nuts (sorry, I could not help myself).
Doing so would ignore the facts, however. It is not just the "few
bad apples" who have offered illegal counseling. The entire
apparatus of ACORN has proved itself corrupt. ACORN's impropriety
does not end with O'Keefe's investigation; the claims of voter
fraud carry water, especially since the federal government, until
recently, paid the group for census counting.

O'Keefe has filmed ACORN offices in New York, Washington D.C.,
Baltimore, San Diego, San Bernadino, Los Angeles and Philadelphia —
though as of now, he has not released the tapes of the last two
cities. This is not a one-time thing with a couple bad employees.
This is a more profound, epidemic problem in ACORN; they believe
themselves above the law, and their arrogance is astounding. At the
very least, a non-partisan Congressional investigation should
review all of ACORN's activities. In the meantime, the federal
government should suspend all funding to the organization. ACORN
cannot continue its improper practices. Allowing them to do so
would be undemocratic and would violate the republican values upon
which our country was founded.

There is a larger point to this entire drama. And at the very
tip of the point, there is James O'Keefe. While conservatives have
typically dominated talk-radio, progressives and liberals have
mostly controlled news shows and newspapers. In other words,
conservatives have been able to inject their opinions about the
stories, but liberals have mostly controlled the reporting. This is
not to say that there is no such thing as an unbiased liberal
reporter. Quite the contrary, I think there are many excellent
mainstream reporters, but they are most certainly not
conservatives.

In presenting these videos, O'Keefe has not presented himself as
a political commentator, but as a reporter. I prefer the term
muckraker, because it conjures up the image of a whistleblower, of
an undercover reporter breaking the big story, and that certainly
applies to O'Keefe.

Yes, O'Keefe is a conservative, but his reporting is universal.
This self-described "whitest kid you will ever meet" took a camera,
recorded videos and posted them on a blog. But he did not record
his rants or simply tell us his opinion. He broke a story that no
news agency was reporting. This should teach us an important lesson
about the future of journalism. Muckraking no longer belongs to the
newspapers or magazines. In fact, it is the minority that now uses
print journalism as its primary source of news. The future belongs
to the Internet, and in that sense, the future also belongs to
everyone with an opinion and a computer. But, O'Keefe has taught us
that perhaps there can be depth to that reporting. Even for a
fleeting moment, we were reminded what real journalism should look
like. And for that, he has earned my respect and admiration.

Noah Glyn is a School of Arts and Sciences sophomore majoring in
economics. He is also the vice president of the Rutgers College
Republicans.